Tips & Opinions

A new ethnic group? Prussian-Quebecois.

Everyone claims an ethnicity. Me, too.

So far as I  know, my sister and I form a rather distinct, maybe even a unique, ethnic group.  Yep, we are Prussian-Quebecois. We like to think of ourselves a being fairly unique and special.  After all our parents said we were special, and they wouldn’t lie. Would they?

The really sad thing is it looks like our ethnic group is about to die out.  Today, we are both approaching 60 and in our youth we demonstrated immensely poor ethnic planning skills when it came to choosing our spouses.  Neither of us remained within our ethnic group! My sister chose an Irish-German guy; and I chose a German-Swedish-Norwegian girl. Sacré bleu!

Now, not even our own children fit into our ethnic group.  What can you do?  And now! It looks like all the things we value most about our ethnicity are soon to disappear… but, never mind.

Odd thought stream, I know. 

Yet as I encounter more and more folks doing genealogy work, I also seem to encounter many who are ‘worried’ or ‘concerned’ about proving their ‘ethnicity’.  Do we even have a good, solid, mutually agreed upon definition of what an ethnicity is? Or, is ethnicity simply a convenient way for us to self-identify and affiliate based upon a personal, familial, or desired preference?

As a genealogist, I think about such things. I know- I know; I probably ought to think about something else…

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ManyRoads Creator, Professional Genealogist, Family Historian, ManyRoads Podcast co-host, Old Guy and most importantly 'opa'